How to align an item relative to it's parent?

[arechsteiner]

I want to center the text on this button with the align feature. The text is a child of the box

How do I do this? This used to be possible by selecting the child on the canvas, then select the parent on the canvas holding shift (or ctrl+shift). It seems this does no longer work.

I went through the options in the align tool but none of them seem to do this. This would be one of the most common alignment actions, no? At least for me it is.

Cheers

[R C-R]

I don't remember ever being able to select a parent object & its child layer separately -- to the best of my memory, selecting the parent automatically includes its children. But regardless of that, it should be simple to center-align a child inside its parent by using snapping, as long as at least the options shown below are enabled in the Snapping manager.

Just select the child object with the Move tool & snap it to the parent's mid (or other) points. For text objects, it may be necessary to center align the text.

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, arechsteiner said:

I want to center the text on this button with the align feature. The text is a child of the box

How do I do this? This used to be possible by selecting the child on the canvas, then select the parent on the canvas holding shift (or ctrl+shift). It seems this does no longer work.

I went through the options in the align tool but none of them seem to do this. This would be one of the most common alignment actions, no? At least for me it is.

You are right usually one would expect this to work, but it doesn't. - Instead you have to draw ...

1. your button layer
2. then your art text layer
3. now select the whole (both) and then apply the align tool's align horiz/vert selection buttons.
   This should adjust the text correctly on the middle of the button
4. now drag your top text layer as a child under the button layer or group the whole

[R C-R]

26 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

You are right usually one would expect this to work, but it doesn't. - Instead you have to draw ...

... or you could just use snapping, which among other things for text allows baseline or descender or whatever alignment, & is much quicker than fooling around with alignment options.

[v_kyr]

... or you could have a predefined button with an embedded centered text object, which from ground up is pretty right aligned here. This is even more quicker!

[arechsteiner]

Snapping doesn't really work for me for some reason. I turned those options on but when I move it around the middle of the box it doesn't snap to anything.

[R C-R]

8 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

... or you could have a predefined button with an embedded centered text object, which from ground up is pretty right aligned here. This is even more quicker!

I assume you do not mean "right aligned" literally but instead "correctly aligned," but regardless for text "correct" alignment can have several different meanings depending on context & content. For example, if the text has an effect applied that is not symmetrical in all directions, the visual alignment may be different from the geometric one. Or consider text with mixed fonts, styles, leading, super/subscript characters, or any of the other possible variations. Neither baseline nor bounding box nor any other alignment reference will never work for everything.

 

16 minutes ago, arechsteiner said:

Snapping doesn't really work for me for some reason. I turned those options on but when I move it around the middle of the box it doesn't snap to anything.

The most common reason for this is not having the appropriate 'Candidates' options selected. Snapping can also be difficult to use if there are too many potential candidate objects nearby or too many other snapping options enabled.

[bpk]

Fund this thread via googling for a solution.

I would *love* to have the alignment tools work within groups, but I think I understand the challenges.

Poking around in the Snapping Manager, selecting 'include bounding box mid points' gave me the guide to center:center my inner object. So that's keeping me happy for now, but I'd still +1 for getting first-class alignment support (then I can hotkey it!)

[GarryP]

Note: You can keep the text centred in the button by altering the Constraints, as per my attached GIF.